STOP THE DIET, I WANT TO GET OFF! by Lisa Tillinger Johansen (Excerpt)

The Paleo.The Zone.The Gluten-free.Another day, another diet.We’re caught in a never-ending merry-go-round
of weight loss plans, fueled by celebrity endorsers, TV doctors and companies
angling for a piece of a $60 billion industry.But do these diets really work?And how healthy are they?

Registered Dietitian Lisa Tillinger
Johansen examines dozens of the most wildly popular diets based on medical
facts, not hype.And along the way, she
reveals tried-and-true weight loss strategies, relying on her years of hospital
experience, weight-loss seminars and community outreach efforts.With insight and humor, Stop The Diet, I
Want To Get Off shows that the best answer is often not a trendy
celebrity-endorsed diet, but easy-to-follow guidelines that are best for our
health and our waistlines.

Book Excerpt

The idea
for this book began at a wedding.

Who
doesn’t love a good wedding? The clothes, the flowers, the romance, the food…

Ah, the
food. As we moved into the banquet hall, the culinary feast was on everyone’s
minds. It was all anyone seemed talk about. But for some reason, guests weren’t
conversing about the dishes being served; they were swapping stories of diets
they had heard about from friends, magazine articles, even celebrities on talk
shows.

I’m a
registered dietitian with a master’s degree in nutritional science and years of
clinical and health education experience. I’ve counseled thousands of patients
and clients on all of these diets. But hearing the guests only momentarily
distracted me from my horrible faux pas of wearing white (gasp!) to a friend’s
wedding.

“I’m on
the Blood Type Diet,” said a woman with an impossibly high bouffant hairdo.
“You’ve heard of that, haven’t you? It’s the one where you choose your foods
based on your blood type. I’m an AB, so I’ll be having the fish.”

“Really?”
her friend replied. “I swear by the gluten-free diet. I’m on it, my
daughter’s on it, and my granddaughter’s on it.”

I happened
to know her granddaughter was six and didn’t have a gluten sensitivity or
celiac disease.

Then there
was the stocky guy who was trying to impress one of the bridesmaids. “I’m a
paleo man myself,” he said, piling his plate high with beef kebabs. “It gives
me more stamina, know what I mean? It puts me in touch with my inner caveman.
There’s a restaurant near my apartment that’s paleo friendly. Maybe we can grab
a bite there sometime, or…Hey wait, where are you going?”

And there
were three Weight Watchers sisters who typed furiously on their phones and
argued over their meals’ point values. Apparently there was some discrepancy
between their various apps, and the sisters’ discussion was becoming more
heated by the moment.

I’m past
the point of being surprised by the wide range of weight-loss strategies—

some worthless,
some crazy, some quite reasonable—being tossed around. In the past few years,
there has been a tidal wave of diets washing up on the shores of our
nutritional consciousness. Celebrities prance across our screens, promoting a
variety of weight-loss schemes on talk shows and infomercials. Medical doctors
star in their own syndicated television programs, exposing millions to
weight-loss techniques, often unsupported by medical research. Other diets get
traction on the Internet, racing all over the globe in social media posts,
YouTube videos, and annoying spam e-mails. It’s hard to walk past a shopping
center vitamin store without being approached by salespeople trying to pitch
the latest weight-loss supplements. It seems that everyone wants a piece of the
pie; the American diet industry tops $60 billion annually.

It’s
classic information overload. You can’t blame people for being confused by all
the diets out there, even as crazy as some of them may sound. I didn’t speak up
to my fellow wedding guests that day, but it occurred to me they would benefit
from some hard facts about the diets they so ardently follow.

So during
the toasts, I thought to myself, I should write a book.

I counsel
clients on these matters each week, giving them information they need to make
the best choices for their health and waistlines. I find that all too often
there’s nothing to the diets that are presented to me in my counseling
sessions and classes. They just plain don’t work, particularly over the long
term. And some of them are harmful, even potentially lethal. But it’s also
unhealthy to carry extra weight on our frames. So how do we separate good diets
from the bad?

In the
chapters to come, we’ll take a good, hard look at the various weight-loss plans
out there. I’ll pull no punches in my professional evaluation of some of the
most wildly popular diets, both bad and good, of the past few years. And along
the way, I’ll explore tried-and-true strategies for losing weight, based on my
years of hospital experience, weight-loss seminars, and community outreach
efforts. More often than not, the best answer is not a trendy
celebrity-endorsed diet, but instead a few easy-to-follow guidelines that I’ve
seen work in literally thousands of cases.

Enough is
enough. It’s time for the madness—and the diets—to stop.

LISA TILLINGER JOHANSEN, MS, RD is a
Registered Dietitian who counsels clients on a wide range of health issues. Her
debut nutrition book, Fast Food Vindication, received the Discovery
Award (sponsored by USA Today, Kirkus and The Huffington Post).She lives in Southern California.

About Me

Mother of two amazing kids, Miss A™ entertainment columnist, avid reader bordering book-fetishism. Books are my childhood friends, my stress-relief therapy, my wings to fly to faraway lands and distant times, my source of knowledge and inspiration. I simply adore them and consume them aplenty. My "book love affair" began in my early teens with the Bronte sisters, Dickens, Austen, Poe, Conrad, and James. My taste in reading was shaped by those masters and still today, when I read fiction, I appreciate the dark tones, the Gothic touches, and the psychological insight typical of those classics.